December 8, 2009

Like millions of other Twitter users, I use Twitter as a serious business tool, to enhance my business interests. But I also enjoy using Twitter for the fun aspect that is inherent in its DNA.

Let’s face it, Twitter is a lot of fun! And it has spawned an entire industry of amazing Twitter tools that are not only fun – but can also help you maximize the power of Twitter, as well as enhance your business interests.

Following are 32 Fun and Useful Twitter Tools. Enjoy!

1. BackType Plugins
backtype.com/plugins

Backtype.com is a real-time conversational search engine that helps users find, follow and share comments from blogs, social networks and other social media. Very, very cool.

CureCRM is a Twitter CRM (Customer Realationship Management) tool. It works on your desktop and gives you the ability to automatically record email conversations into salesforce cases, contacts, opportunities, and leads entries. It also schedules meetings, manages your calendar, and reminds colleagues to attend meetings.

This is my favorite Twitter tool. It tells you who you’re following who’s not following you back. This tool allows you to stay on top of your unfollows, as well as “trim your Twitter fat”, so to speak.

4. Featured Users featuredUsers.com

Featured Users is a Twitter application ad network. It appears to be affiliated with the aforementioned Friend or Follow. Here’s how it works: When you purchase impressions, your Twitter profile is displayed on the Twitter applications in the Featured Users network. The more impressions you purchase, the more often your profile is displayed.

It actually looks pretty cool. I haven’t tried this one yet, but I’m seriously thinking about it. They also have a user referral program that will allow you to make money when you refer customers to their program.

5. GeoFollow geofollow.com

Geofollow bills itself as “The Largest Location Based Twitter Directory on The Net.” GeoFollow allows you to list yourself geographically, and categorically, simply by sending a twitter reply. Pretty cool.

GoTwitr is a Twitter referral service. However, what makes GoTwitr different from other Twitter referal services is the fact GoTwitr gives you the ability to preview in detail everyone you follow or unfollow.

That way, your community will be made up of people who actually share your interests.

HootSuite is yet another free professional Twitter client. Here are some of the functions that HootSuite performs: Manages multiple Twtitter accounts, tracks how many people click the links you tweet out, pre-schedules your messages, submits your blog feed to Twitter and more.

8. OpenBreak (Formerly TwitterBerry) orangatame.com/products/openbeak

Billed as “The evolution of TwitterBerry,” OpenBeak is mobile client for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so you don’t need to use SMS. OpenBeak is the evolution of TwitterBerry, and the new name allows the app to grow beyond both the Twitter platform and BlackBerry smartphones.

PeopleBrowsr is a real time data mine and social search engine. It allows you to monitor your brand, manage feedback, share accounts, run campaigns, track keywords, build widgets and engage across multiple social networks simultaneously.

Qwitter is a Twitter tool that notifies you when you get un-followed. Qwitter checks your followers and notifies you as often as it can, depending on how many people are using it and how many followers they have.

Now here’s what’s really cool about Qwitter. Not only will it alert you as to who is no longer following you, but it will also show you the tweet you posted that (may or may not) have caused the person to unsubscribe. Very useful.

Seesmic Desktop is a Twitter client and desktop app which allows you to view multiple accounts in one window. Not only will you be able to view multiple accounts, you will be able to view the window in columns (similar to Tweetdeck).

SocialOomph is a free Twitter tool that lets you set your tweets to be sent at specific time intervals, track keywords, automatically send welcome direct messages (DM’s)to new followers, purge your direct messages and more.

14. Trendistic
trendistic.com/_help

Ever heard of Google Trends? Well, Trendistic is similar to that. Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals.

TwitterMail is a service for users of Twitter that allows them to redirect email to their twitter account.

Here’s how it works: When you give TwitterMail your Twitter credentials they supply you with a unique TwitterMail email address. For instance, abc123example@twittermail.com. If you send an email to that address it will be posted to Twitter.com (By the way, that’s a fake Twittermail address, so don’t use it).

If you’re a Firefox user, this one’s for you. Twitbin is a Firefox extension that allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar. Twitbin allows you to send messages, receive messages, share links, and more. Great Firefox extension!

Supporting a cause? Twibbon allows you to promote your cause through Twitter. Twibbon overlays a small icon onto supporters’ profile images to create a ‘Twibbon’, making an impactful online statement. The user’s Twitter account automatically tweets to let everyone know about their affiliation.

TweetDeck is your personal social networking dashboard for staying in touch with what’s happening now on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. In fact, you can do so many things with TweetDeck, you are limited only by your imagination.

Twitterfeed allows you to publish updates from any RSS feed to your Twitter account. You then have the ability to decide how frequently you want Twitterfeed to check your feed updates and how many updated articles to post to Twitter.

If you have a lot of Twitter followers and want to show them off, you’ll find this is an interesting tool. TwitterCounter is a statistics tool which allows you to display the number of Twitter followers you have on your blog.

It will also display whether your followers are increasing or decreasing. The service also has a Twitter Remote widget that you can add to your blog sidebar for more interaction with your followers.

Want to know who has the most followers on Twitter? Then Twitterholic is the tool for you. But Twitterholic goes one step further, not only does it allow you to see who has the most followers, it also allows you to check your own ranking in the Twitter universe. Great tool!

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts. It features hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people in specific niches.

Here’s how it works: Twellow grabs publicly available messages from Twitter. Twellow then analyzes and categorizes each of the users responsible for those messages into the various categories found on its website.

TwitterLocal is an Adobe AIR based application that allows you to filter Tweets by location. You can generate an RSS or XML feed, which allows you to receive Tweets from a specified area, including city, state, postal code and mile radius.

TweetBrain is a crowdsourcing service powered by the Twitter community. It enables you to get quality answers to your Twitter questions quickly – sort of like Yahoo Answers for Twitter users. Very cool.

TwitterFox is Firefox web browser plugin that TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets on Twitter. This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets.

It also has a small text input field to update your tweets. In addition, TwitterFox allows you to view Tweets within your own web browser, in a popup menu. This is extremely convenient and eliminates the need to constantly go to the Twitter website.

Sideline is an Adobe AIR desktop application that allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.

David Jackson is the owner of http://reviews-by-customers.com – the Internet’s most exclusive, free business directory. If you would like The Secret to Non-Stop, FREE Targeted Traffic, read this: http://tinyurl.com/ygdrd68